Books like Second Chance Love In Point Perry — picked by fans

When thinking of small-town romances, the Virgin River series has been a highly successful book and a very successful TV series.

It ticks all the must-have points for a small-town romance. I liked nurse practitioner Melinda’s adventurous spirit as she moved from LA to Virgin River, and I thought the slow-burn romance between Melinda and Jack was well done. In this series, Robyn Carr tends to introduce the central character for her next book towards the end of the current book. It was very well done, and I found myself invested and wanting to read the next book to follow the next character’s journey. 

I also liked that the books in the series dealt with medical emergencies and serious medical topics such as addiction and infertility.

Whilst I enjoy the overall feel of the community spirit and support in small-town romances, I also appreciate laugh-out-loud moments.

Kristan Higgins incorporated humour masterfully, so I was laughing one moment, then being moved to tears by the emotional depth, which had me empathising with characters who were real. The characters were flawed but so loveable that I was rooting for them to find their happy ever after endings!

I found my emotions see-sawing a bit as I read this book, but this made the payoff of the happy ending all the sweeter.

I don’t mind a little bit of spice in romance books, but I also enjoy the sweeter romances that RaeAnne Thayne writes.

I agree that they have a real Hallmark flavour to them, and while I don’t write that style, I loved the Haven Point series. I find this author’s focus on families very satisfying; I love the relatability of her characters and the deep dive into the emotional connections between them.

I also like the way she handles more sensitive topics such as grief and depression. I think it’s really important to include such very important topics in romance novels, as I think the way the characters handle the situations they face can be an inspiration sometimes for readers who are going through similar dilemmas.

The Dream Harbor series is a collection of stand-alone novels set in Dream Harbor, and I love that the small-town romance series has recurring characters that I was interested in and felt as though I’d bonded with.

One of the classic tropes used in this series is especially evident in book one (Pumpkin Spice Café in Dream Harbor) and it’s a trope I love. The author has made the most of these opposites-attract characters to produce some very witty banter that had me laughing out loud.

There’s a lot of personal growth of Laurie Gilmore’s characters, and I felt the romance was truly heartwarming.

Andrew Hook is a European slipstream author proficient in the literary weird. He certainly does not disappoint in his new collection of Hollywood’s living dead. Candescent Blooms rouses legends of the silver screen right there in your living room, and they are broken, unbroken, full of many secrets. And you know, you know—because history says so—that the actors and actresses are dead, yet living, right there on your page. Imbued with levity wrapped in anguish. Thimble-sized, you will not find a literary collection this superb in a long time.   

I really enjoyed reading this book on the development of Australian film culture and history from the silent cinema to the talkies. Diane Collins looks at unexamined areas of this history, including audiences, marketing, and distribution, and even has a chapter about how picture palaces used to have live music at every screening.

This is an engagingly written account that provides important context for any consideration of Australian cinema history. 

Melanie is passionate about the great outdoors and has hiked all over Australia. Her book (a second edition is due out in early 2022) covers an incredible 66 walks and her love of the landscape shines through. Some of the walks are well known, such as Tasmania’s Overland Track, while others are lesser-known. Designed for all abilities and time constraints, there’s really something for everyone, whether you want to walk in tropical rainforests or rocky ancient escarpments. It makes me want to pull on my hiking boots and go!

I loved this book of adventure, passion, discovery and love.

Flinders was one of the most important pioneers of early Australia, and yet he is hardly mentioned in Australia today. The book promotes itself by saying Flinders put Australia on the map. In fact, he was the first person to circumnavigate Australia and create the charts that are still used today.

The book made me realise what a struggle his life became, complicated by the war with France, his long imprisonment, shipwrecks, hunger, and his longing to return to his beloved wife Ann.

No easy way describes Kaaron Warren’s darkest mind full of mischief and intensity. She’s a global legend, no worries, with her distinctive Australian tongue. Find wicked excitement in Warren’s horror, disturbing in its nature, leaving nothing untouched. Even babies are not safe. This primer is a quick introduction to ominous storytelling, that may pave way to curiosity into award-winning works, including Tide of Stone or Into Bones Like Oil. Starting here, with illustrations and an exegetical analysis by Michael Arnzen, is perhaps the soundest way to dip a toe into the humour, surreally, and darkness of this author’s alluring text. 

Ken Inglis, an Australian who began as a scholar of religion in Victorian Britain, discovered in the 1980s that he wanted to understand the way war (which had been neglected by Australians more interested in organised labour or ‘the Bush’) had shaped the nation in the twentieth century. He found that war memorials, a pervasive feature of the Australian landscape, provided a key to that question. Based on a huge national survey and the labour of willing volunteers, in 1998 he, at last, published his magisterial Sacred Places, a study of ‘war memorials in the Australian landscape’. Rightly revered by those fortunate to have known him as a wise and humane scholar, Ken’s book – successively revised as anniversaries and war memorials proliferated – appeared in three prize-winning editions. Ken died in 2017, mourned as a key pioneer in understanding how war has permeated Australia’s modern history.